Interview with Luis Martinez, Dia

A masterclass in loyalty

Luis Martinez has worked at Dia, the Spanish multinational grocer, for 30 years. Currently Commercial Director for Dia Spain and Chief Customer Digital Transformation Officer, one of his many achievements includes developing the Dia Club loyalty card, which had 32 million members in 2017 and is one of the leading CRM programmes in the region.

We spoke to Luis on Dia’s approach to loyalty and how he’s future-proofing the business.

It is unusual for a discounter to have such a focus on customer loyalty and digital apps. Why has Dia taken this approach?

Dia is a Spanish-based multinational retailer whose heritage is in small proximity stores. To offer the best commercial proposal to our customers in a competitive environment, we were interested in a loyalty programme as a source of data to better understand the behaviour of customers and adapt our offer accordingly. This is how Club Dia was born.

This led us to develop a powerful system of personalised offers, helping transform our loyalty programme into one of the pillars of our competitive differentiation. We currently have 20 million loyal customers in the countries in which Dia operates: Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Argentina.

The natural continuation of this philosophy is the app, adapting our knowledge of customers through data into the digital environment, offering differential value through this means.

Personalisation is strong in Dia’s loyalty offer. How important is this?

Personalisation is very important: we issue more than two billion personalised coupons per year in the four countries in which we are present. We have a penetration of more than 75% and more than 90% of our customers use the coupons as a source of savings at Dia each year.

What challenges or opportunities does e-commerce create for Dia?

E-commerce is obviously a source of great opportunities for our company. Currently we are active in more than 30 cities in Spain and we have a market share in the online grocery sector that is around 10%. Our model is based on serving from physical stores and, as we have an extensive store network, we cover a large part of the territory and can serve customers at a reasonable cost.

We have a very wide assortment that satisfies many customer needs and our partnerships, such as the one we have with Amazon in Spain or the creation of the Oportunidades Dia non-food platform, enable us to offer an even more comprehensive online proposition.

Which other retailers or service providers do you admire in their approach to creating loyalty?

I believe that in other sectors such as fashion, financial services or tourism, a great deal of progress is being made in personalisation through the digitalization of services. There is a lot for retailers to learn from other industries.